October 15 2025, 08:15 
Out former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg believes there is still hope for a bright American future – and that the sooner we all allow ourselves to believe in one, too, the sooner that future will arrive.
“I’ve heard it said that hope is the consequence of action more than its cause,” he told David Leonhardt while appearing on the New York Times Podcast, The Opinions, “and that’s something I try to think about a lot in this moment. Instead of waiting around for hope, we actually have an obligation — a responsibility — to build hope, and that hope is the result of what we do in this moment.”
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Leaders of all parties, Buttigieg explained, need to use the president’s “burn it all down” strategy as an opportunity to rebuild the institutions he has decimated and make them better than they were before.
“I’m not saying it was OK to tear them down. I’m saying that since it’s happening, we might as well face the fact that they weren’t perfect before, and now we can rebuild them.”
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And there is no time like the present to start hatching plans, he explained. “One day,
Buttigieg also shared what he thinks Democrats must do to win back voters. While championing marginalized identities should remain critical to the progressive message, he said, liberals also must make it clear that’s not all they care about and communicate that despite “serious patterns of exclusion and unfairness,” they don’t see the country as “fundamentally evil.”
“If it seems that all we can see is one group at a time, then we’re not really telling a story that speaks to everybody or one that people can see themselves belonging in, whatever group or identity they might claim,” he said.
But he also warned not to let “introspection turn into navel-gazing.”
“We can’t lose sight of the fact that on the majority of the biggest issues, most people tend to agree with us… There are issue after issue where there’s 60, 70 percent consensus on a position that Democrats hold and Republicans oppose. What I don’t want is for us to think we need to shy away from our values or important fights just because the last election didn’t go our way.”
He said leadership today must be a combination of consensus-building and introducing “big, bold changes, even if people aren’t prepared for that yet.”
The only way to prepare people for big change, he said, is to continue to introduce the big idea. Some things may take a generation, he acknowledged, but that’s why it’s important to start talking about them now.
But Buttigieg agreed with Leonhardt that the LGBTQ+ rights movement is an example of how quickly a strong, well-organized, strategic movement can change hearts, minds, and laws.
“So much of politics and making change has to do with how people feel about themselves – how you make people feel about themselves. A lot of what happened with the struggle for equality was about coaxing people onto the right side of history, rather than dragging them there.”
“There’s a trajectory here that shows enormous change can happen when you’re willing to play out that strategy over the long term,” he added. “What is inspiring about the gay equality movement – not just to somebody who benefits from it, but that it didn’t just take something from being unpopular to being popular. It took ideas that were preposterous for one generation and made them consensus for the next generation. That’s the level of ambition we ought to have.”
So what do we do with all of that ambition? Or, as Leonhardt put it, “How can we get the country to move out of this incredible darkness?”
Buttigieg said we need a shared national project and more opportunities to build community.
“We know the very ugly alternatives for people who can’t seem to find belonging, and those include extremism and nationalism. I think we can and should do better, and some of the labor market upheaval that’s coming our way [due to artificial intelligence] will probably force us to do that.”
Rebuilding our institutions could be one shared project, he said, but it would require the GOP “to evolve into being more about building than destroying” and would mean Democrats need “to get more interested in what we can do next than in preserving the status quo that’s being smashed to pieces.”
There is also the need to create more opportunities for people to connect offline, he said.
“I think investing in what’s sometimes called social infrastructure – I literally mean things like parks and recreation. If you have more safe, physical spaces for your kids to play in and for people to gather in, that really matters. It can help be an antidote to the retreat into the screen, which is harmful for kids and, I think, pretty poisonous for adults too.”
Buttigieg has been speaking out regularly on how Democrats and Republicans alike can move on from Donald Trump, and he has mentioned before how important it is to start planning for a time when Trump is no longer involved in American politics.
In September, he encouraged progressive politicians to reclaim the language of patriotism and reinvent themselves as champions of working people rather than just pledging to undo the damage of the current president.
“I did not come here to tell everybody that things are better than they look. They’re not,” Buttigieg said at the Global Progress Action Summit in London (a conference of progressive political thinkers). “They’re probably going to get worse before they get better. And yet I’m optimistic, not because things are better than they look, but because things have reached the point where we will have to fashion something entirely new. We will have to do it on the day, and it will come when Donald Trump is no longer politically active in the United States, which will happen.”
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